Serial Killer Culture Part II

Most people have read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or at least know the general concept, but not everyone knows that when they watch a movie that has a killer as a main character, they become their own Mr. Hyde. It is hard to admit. I have been studying this topic for an entire semester and still cannot admit it, but when we watch serial killer movies, we secretly live out all of our own dark fantasies.

Serial killer movies portray some of the grotesque crimes the human race has produced, but somehow society has absolutely no problem with them. Silence of the Lambs, a movie about a cannibalistic serial killer, and a serial killer who uses women’s skin to create a full body suit for himself, is arguable one of the most celebrated films of all time, winning Academy Awards in all five major categories.

I will admit that I love dark, violent movies, and am especially fascinated by the films that contain serial killers. Silence of the Lambs is one of my favorite movies, and I personally do not think there will ever be a better movie ending than Hannibal Lecter saying, “I have to go, I’m having a friend for dinner.” Despite all that, I still find it strange that I am not concerned that Lecter is one of the most famous and well liked movie characters of all time, and it seems to me that you should, too.

~Anna

Leadership Without Communication Is Not Leadership

Imagine for a moment that you belonged to a club where the president of the club did everything by herself. She used only her ideas and never listened to the thoughts and feelings of the members. Don’t you think you would become frustrated and angry with her? Would you feel unheard and unimportant because she continually shot down the ideas of others? This is not good leadership. A good leader understands the importance of listening to what others have to say and makes people feel heard and understood. What if instead the president had taken the time to listen to what each member had to say and acknowledged their ideas? Not only would the club members feel like they had more say in what happened in the club, they would also gain a greater respect for the president as a leader.

Although my focus for my ELI this semester has been on becoming a better public speaker and communicator, one of my main goals was to apply communication and public speaking skills to leading and apply the skills I learn to my leadership. The communication process plays a very vital role in leadership because without it how would a leader lead?

A leader is someone who has a purpose and is able to convince others of the importance of her purpose. It is through good communication skills that a person is able to do this. In the book The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Good Leader, John C. Maxwell states, “People will not follow you if they do not know what you want or where you are going.” Clear communication enables a leader to share her point of view while responding to the opinions and ideas of others in such a way that makes them feel heard and important. People are more likely to follow a leader when they feel like their ideas are taken seriously.

Communication is a long process that takes a lot of work before perfection is reached. If a leader implements the necessary aspects of communication into how she interacts with others, she will create stronger credibility and gain more support for her ideas.  

-Elli

More Than a Musician’s Worry

Walking out on stage, violin tucked under my arm, the bright lights blind me from being able to see the black pit that makes up my audience. My fingers are a cold, clammy mess, and there are butterflies - no, caterpillars - making their way around my stomach. As I bow, I worry that I’m going to trip, fall, and! look, there goes my career. But I don’t fall, and the audience quiets down, some last reshuffling and repositioning as I place my violin on my shoulder. I let go of my fears and start playing, when suddenly, my stage fright returns and I stumble my way up a difficult passage. Smiling in nervousness, I try to forget the mistake and continue on, but it haunts me, and I make more and more slips in the piece. I finally finish, but no joy comes to me from completing the piece. The audience claps politely, I slip away behind the curtain, and the next performer is up. But I stew in frustration. My performance was a disaster.

While there may only be a few who struggle as I did with stage fright, performance anxiety affects millions of people worldwide. Actors, musicians, athletes, test-takers, public speakers… Few are free from the burdens of stage fright.

I decided to focus part of my ELI on performance anxiety this semester. Although I have been growing musically, my stage fright hinders me from reaching playing my best during my performances. I was interested in learning about what makes me nervous and understanding how to make performance anxiety work in a positive, instead of a negative, manner for me.

For some, thinking about the audience in just their underwear staves off their stage fright. Others, like me, need a different approach. I have learned about centering, anxiety hierarchies, “un-catastrophizing,” mental rehearsal, and other techniques to avoid the negative consequences of performance anxiety. However, it’s important to keep in mind that performance anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing. No stage fright is perhaps almost as bad as having too much. Having the right amount of performance anxiety will lead to a better performance; the anticipation and excitement of being on stage will sharpen the performer’s finesse. The skill needed for all performers is to be able to walk the fine line between none to nauseum in order to perform at full potential.

~Satoka

The Thought Process Behind Short Stories

Short stories can be some of the hardest types of writing to master. When writing, it is essential to actually think about what you are putting down on paper and what you are trying to say. I’ve always been fascinated by stories in general, with so many different elements going into each piece of work, but short stories are a separate entity from the realm of novels. For starters, short stories are, well, short, and this changes the way that the elements of the story can be developed and manipulated. When a story is fairly short in length, personality of characters generally cannot be developed very well, and the setting can be harder to develop as well.

Something common in short stories is often the author’s inability to properly develop a consistent storyline. A common fault in short stories is an overdeveloped plot, as it is common to think of an idea that is too complicated for the way that the idea can be implemented into a short story. This is one reason that I chose to work with short stories, because I enjoy writing plot, and think of it as a challenge to create a plot that can easily fit into a short story successfully.

Now, as for why I chose to work on short stories. As I enjoy writing, but often find it challenging to do, I thought that it would be a good idea to do something on writing for my ELI. As it is generally not plausible to write a novel within a few months with no previous experience in writing, I thought a good way to be able to achieve a sense of creative writing was to write short stories. Although short stories are hard to write, I believe that if something is hard, it is simply a challenge, which is why I chose to write short stories. I plan on achieving my goal of refining my writing in this ELI by reading many short stories and then studying the stories. After this, I will practice writing stories using techniques that I have studied from the stories that I have read. This is how I plan on achieving some of my goals throughout this ELI.

~Ben

C++ Blog the 2nd

NIM is a computer game where the players remove a number objects, and the one forced to remove the last objects loses. This was the second program project Ranger and I worked on. This one uses loops and random numbers. We changed the output to say “who had won.”

Random numbers are hard for computers to work with. When I hit “3” almost every time, I would always win. This was because the computer would always generate the same sequence of random numbers. So we had to start the game in a new place.

Loops would always continue on and on until we got out of it. We use loops in games to make turns continue until somebody wins.

We also made our game player versus player and it was kind of hard to do. We had to make the code for Player 2 to do the same thing that Player 1 does. This program was harder to write than the first one.

~Craig

Why should we even care about plant evolution (and other mysteries)?

Throughout this semester and last, during which I studied plant evolution and phylogenies in island environments, I have been asked the question, “So, why are you doing this? Like, what is so special about a plant?” I would ponder over this question myself, and finally came to the conclusion of why plants are so important to understanding the history of the evolution of all life-forms. Though animals may seem more exciting to study because they move and eat and make noises, they would not be alive without the vast diversity of plants that have been able to adapt to the different environments on this earth - animals have only been able to adapt to life on earth because of the migration of plants from water to land and their adaptations. But most intriguing for evolutionary studies is the evolution of plant species in island or island-like environments (that includes montane regions).

This semester I am studying the evolution of Scalesia on the Galapagos islands. According to previous studies, Scalesia is part of the Heliantheae genus and is a sister clade to the Viguiera subspecies. Viguiera originated from the Peruvian Andes and relates perfectly to my previous ELI subject, the evolution of Lupine species in the Peruvian Andes at extreme elevations. Apparently, during the late Pleistocene, a land bridge formed between North and South America, which allowed for the transfer of Viguiera to the Galapagos islands as well.

Some of the background I have needed to understand my reading about previous research done on the Galapagos involves data analysis methods such as Bayesian Inference, Maximum Likelihood, and Maximum Parsimony. Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian Inference are very similar - they describe the statistical probability that a character (a trait) may change from one state (for example, from a cytosine to a guanine) in a population by using statistical algorithms that nowadays are mostly calculated by nifty computer programs.

The fact that one can infer the tree phylogeny of several species in a genus from observing the rate of change of character states seemed intriguing to me, and it made me wonder if there was any chemistry involved in the process. Throughout the year I have been taking AP Chemistry online and had relatively recently learned about the rate of reaction in a chemical system at different states (such as equilibrium state, increased pressure or volume, or other environmental stresses that may affect entropy and enthalpy which in turn affect Gibbs Free energy). I wondered if perhaps the probability of the rate of change between different nucleotides in a DNA sequence in a species could be related to the rate of reaction of that change, which was affected by the outside environment, in which the species were situated due to epigenetic markers that were involved in the chemical reaction (as catalysts, buffers, or other).  I felt like this understanding would allow people to better understand why evolution occurs in a population and would allow us to prevent harmful viruses and bacteria spreading.

These thoughts have been floating around in the swirling chasms of my brain, and I hope they interest you too.

~Valeria

Oral History --The Importance of Preserving The “Ordinary”

Almost any student could identify what year World War II ended or who the last President of United States was. Important names and dates such as these are what we are asked to memorize and what fill our textbook pages. But schools rarely teach, and students do not know, what emotions an individual felt when he or she heard the war had ended or the experience of one of the White House Custodians. These personal stories are too specific for classes and textbooks, and so too often die with those who hold the memories. By losing these stories, however, society loses much more than a nice memory, but the very experiences that define the human experience. Such personal stories spin the thread of our shared humanity, the thread which becomes a lifeline in times of personal and international difficulty. The collection and preservation of these stories requires a technique that seeks out the narratives of  “everyday people,” opposed to those of the elites. This technique is Oral History, and the topic of my second ELI.

Before this ELI, I had had little exposure to formal oral history. So little, in fact, that I set a goal to begin by gaining a basic understanding of what oral history really is. After reading and comparing varying definitions from different sources, I have decided to define oral history as the gathering (through audio recording, writing, video, etc.) of historical information through a conversation between two people. This conversation consists of an interviewer asking questions of the narrator, who answers at length from his or her personal experiences. Often these questions are themed (for example: Would you tell me about your experiences as a nurse in World War II?), but do not have to be. Historians can use oral history to gather personal information about a world event or time period, but historians are not the only, or the most important, interviewers. Any person who is interested in the experiences of another can record an interview that could become an important record for individuals, families, and communities.

In the end, the purpose of oral history is to fill in the historical record with personal accounts from everyday people, whether that be done between a granddaughter and grandmother or an historian and war veteran. As I study oral history, I am repeatedly touched by the power it has to save some the most important stories of the human experience, told by those who might otherwise have been overlooked. I believe that recording and cherishing these stories is as important, if not more so, as memorizing the most often identified dates and names in history.

~Emma